He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.
The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure that afternoon.)
I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered—in defiance of his political principles—the Morning Standard, and I had found him reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the Blue Review, which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance. There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their windows by the half-dozen.
I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.
So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really came.
It was very nasty for him.
He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him with a face which, try as he would—and he tried his hardest—he could not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had—as Jevons said afterwards—rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.
And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on. Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the net and trying not to look at him.
I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get across that tennis-ground?
He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.